Sucker

Her dark skin sank into the frothing waves like a drop of ink onto paper, the water beading on her smooth shoulders like millions of shards of glass. He reached out to her, but she was already gone. The sweet stench of seaweed rushed to sting his tear-filled eyes as he slowly turned his back to the sea.

Alas. She was gone, but she was all around him. Even the gaping mouth of last night’s dinner staring blankly at him from its newspaper wrapping seemed to shape her name- Rosie. Pictures she’d drawn in the dust on his coffee table; wrappers in his pockets from gum she’d asked him to hold onto; tea cups, unwashed, stained with her lipstick-- all mementos of her, and he, a veritable curator of loneliness. He rubbed the stump of his left hand, as if alleviating his aching arm would heal his broken heart, and carefully reattached the hook, fighting back a sob as he remembered how Rosie taught him how to play banjo, prosthetic limb and all. His eyes, swimming with memories and misery, turned to the ocean, scanning the horizon fruitlessly for her silhouette. How long he had lived here, a hermit in a crabbing town, huddled away in a wind-bleached cottage on the coast, alone-- until Rosie washed in and out of his life with the roaring tide.

Days and nights passed like a silent current under still water. His heart, bobbing on the buoyancy of sweet memories and sinking under the crushing weight of loss, became numb to all things. Every night, like clockwork, he would climb into bed and sleep a dark, dreamless sleep. Every morning he would coax aching, crackling bones out onto the beach to watch troughs and crests for any sign of Rosie. Nothing. Just the nasal trill of sea-gulls circling him like vultures, as if they could scent the deadness inside him. Cool autumn turned into frozen winter; frozen winter into rainy spring, until finally the canary beak of sunlight pierced the grey sky above and summer spread itself over the rocky coast like a thick pat of butter. The beach became peppered with fishing boats, swimmers, sunbathers. Like always, he would scour the horizon for his beloved. Like always, she did not appear… until one day, simply unextraordinary in any other way, she did. The screams of the beach-goers became as a symphony of violins as she wrapped her eight arms around him. He knew they made a funny pair, a fisherman and the kraken, but he did not care- he was happy at last. She pressed him to her heart, her millions of tiny sucker-pads trembling with emotion as stroked her rippling muscular flesh. He breathed in deeply, luxuriating in her scent of brine and Chanel No. 5.

“Oh Rosie… I thought you’d never come back.”

“SQREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU.”

“I love you too, Rosie.”